HH: All right. Let’s get back to your favorite couple, power couple, Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson. I assume that you watched with rapt attention the Plame testimony?

CH: Couldn’t tear myself away.

HH: And what did you think of it?

CH: Well, I thought that it was really a terrible indictment of Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor, because if anything she said was true, he’s the stupidest prosecutor in the history of the world…

HH: Yes.

CH: …which I don’t think her supporters generally believe. But in other words, if she says that she was a major undercover, cloak and dagger agent, then it’s really bizarre that he found that there had been no breach of the legislation that protects the identity of such agents. And he didn’t find that there’d been any breach of that already, I think, by the way, very restrictive and repressive act. So that’s that.

HH: Now what about…

CH: As to who sent her…did you notice there was quite a funny…sent him, rather, her lovely husband. Did you see a rather funny correction in the New York Times the other day?

HH: No, I didn’t.

CH: It was on the op-ed page an editorialist correction. They had said he’d been sent to Niger by the State Department, and the correction was, after all this time, only last week, they corrected, he was sent there by the CIA. Yes, we always knew that. That’s what the original allegation was, and they might as well have added, as was found by the Senate committee, that the person in the CIA who wanted to send him was his wife.

HH: Yup, although she denied that.

CH: So it was a slam dunk.

HH: She denied that, did she not?

CH: Yeah, well, we have the letter that she sent recommending him. I haven’t got it in front of me, but it’s very easy to find.

HH: Right.

CH: And recommended him particularly, I might add, on the grounds that he was great friends with the Minister of Mines of Niger, the very man, in other words, who he would have been, if he had been doing an investigation, which he wasn’t, having to investigate. So he gets sent there on the grounds that he’s friends of the person who he’s supposed to be suspecting. It’s extraordinary.